IED=WMD?
Why the Justice Department’s charge against the Boston bomber is ridiculous.
BY TIMOTHY NOAH | APRIL 22, 2013
An 11-page federal criminal complaint charges Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving alleged Boston Marathon bomber, with "unlawfully using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction ... against persons and property." The WMD in question was, the document explains, "an improvised explosive device."
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Give me a break. Even granting that the language of the law is not the same as the language of everyday speech, it's ridiculous to call the bombs that went off in Boston "weapons of mass destruction." If any old bomb can be called a WMD, then Saddam most definitely had WMDs before the United States invaded Iraq 10 years ago. And if an IED is a WMD, then Iraq actually ended up with more WMDs after the U.S. invasion than before (and isn't entirely rid of them yet).
Please don't misunderstand me. I'm as horrified by the Boston Marathon bombings as anyone else. They were an act of senseless cruelty, killing three innocent people and injuring more than 200, many of them quite seriously. If Tsarnaev is guilty, he deserves to (and surely will) be punished to the full extent of the law. (Since this complaint was filed in federal rather than state court, the maximum penalty is death.)
But the crude Popular Mechanics-style devices used in the bombings -- pressure cookers retrofitted with explosives -- do not fit any logical definition of WMDs. To stretch the meaning of "weapon of mass destruction" this far renders entirely meaningless a phrase that was already too crudely propagandistic to warrant much respect.
The linguistic fault lies not with prosecutors but with Congress, which in the interest of expanding prosecutorial powers broadened the legal definition of "weapon of mass destruction" until, as Spencer Ackerman of Wired put it, federal statute could no longer distinguish "dangerous weapons from apocalyptic ones." Under 18 USC §2332a, a weapon of mass destruction might be what it's always been understood to be -- a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon. But it can also mean any bomb, grenade, or mine, any rocket with a propellant charge exceeding four ounces, or any missile with an explosive charge exceeding one-quarter ounce. A July 4 cherry bomb, if deployed with sufficient malice, would suffice.
No one minds the hyperbole when it comes to the Boston attacks because the perpetrators of this crime committed an unusually gruesome murder. But the term "WMD" also applies to international relations. Mere possession of WMDs has, in the recent past, been used to justify invading a country and overthrowing its leader. Does the United States really want to put on notice every nation whose military arsenal includes bombs, grenades, and/or mines that they could be next? If we did, our only allies might end up being Andorra, Lichtenstein, Monaco, and the Vatican. (How many WMDs does the pope have?)
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